So as not to die stupid... AIDS

A quite hysterical article by the ICG containing numerous factual inaccuracies in which they attempt to claim that HIV was engineered by some business or government agency. Amongst the numerous errors and falsehoods is repeated reference to the "Aids virus," when in fact there is no such thing. Aids is a set of symptoms caused by the virus, HIV. We reproduce the article for interest only. libcom.org

AIDS, pure product of science !
The following text is not merely the result of a theoretical attempt to place the origin of AIDS back within the mode of production in which it materialised. The text is, above all, the product of a practical struggle led side by side with a militant from our group, who came from North America and who was struck down by AIDS. (Militarists say "hit by", scientists preferring to use the term "struck down by", in order to deny their own responsibility).

Our comrade started to share militant activity with us, on the basis of a radical break from drug addiction. His integration into the group coincided with total abstention from drugs. This is what he said:

"(...) Drug addiction is one of many possible expressions of a social response and position in the face of the frustrations of Capital, along with madness, delinquency and TV addiction. It is an unconscious revolt which stigmatises the refusal of the system in the flesh of its victims. Above all, it is the triumph of Capital's harnessing power: the society of drug addicts is practically the epitome of the capitalist model. Drug addiction is the triumph of individualism and anti-solidarity (each man for himself, dope for himself), the triumph of alienation (the concrete alienation of dependence on a product), the triumph of reification (suicide of a body/object, sold for drugs), the triumph of a palliative (choice between drugs or suffering), the triumph of the commodity (exchange value and use value, having the same denominator: drugs for survival), the triumph of value (a few banknotes for a few milligrams of powder and pleasure), etc... Drug addiction is a system of immediate institutionalised survival, otherwise known as the capitalist system..."

Shortly before writing this, he had learnt that he had AIDS.

It is impossible to describe the struggles of everyday life that this news gave rise to: permanent confrontation with the doctors, violent take over of the medical file compiled on him, radical critique of food (our comrade defined capitalist food as an attempt at generalised poisoning), vicious attempts, in vain, to obtain information on the possibilities publicised by the "alternative" medical vultures, as corrupted by financial interests as their "official" colleagues, struggle against the ideology of anti-pleasure, refusal to die in hospital, permanent battle not to accept -despite every conceivable pressure to do so (1) - the poison AZT, conceived by medical commerce, refusal to take part in experiments aiming to turn him into a guinea-pig,...

We lived every one of these moments together, like brothers in arms, with all the determination and passion for this one "true life" that the militant critique of the State constitutes for us. We discussed and chose, fully aware, the orientation and direction to give each of these moments of permanent struggle, with the result that our comrade did not die ill. He died fighting. He died living, as opposed to the majority of half dead-half living "beings" who populate the realm of capitalist social peace today and whose only reality is dictated by the monster Money, which dominates them.

The text we are publishing here follows the rhythm of all these moments. Most of the thoughts within it, as well as the communist point of view which animates it, are inextricably linked with the innumerable activities and discussions that we had together.

This is why this text is not dedicated to our comrade. This text IS our comrade. Our common break from the present world of death makes perfect sense. Here is how he formulated it:

"(...) The context of our struggle is paradox, is contradiction. 'We take up arms to abolish arms. We survive to abolish survival,... and at last to live. We must assume this contradiction, cross it, if we want, one day in the distant future, to live...In order to escape my 'madness' I arrived at an impasse, with two solutions: to chose to fight or to chose not to fight. I chose."

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"We continue the struggle for you, comrade, who would have put a recording of the Sex Pistols screaming 'No Future' in your own coffin. For you, comrade, whose veins were infested with a deadly substance created by torturers known as 'doctors'.

For you, who died fighting, slowly assassinated by Progress. With our common hatred of Science and the State we continue to fight with you, comrade!..."

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To make it quite clear for those who do not want to be hood-winked, nor to sing along with the State, the lyrics lies spewed out daily by the press, we want to state unequivocally that the AIDS retrovirus is a direct product of the new commercial possibilities opened up by molecular biology! Science, financed and equipped by Research and Progress in the military sector, has produced another 'cock-up' which it is attempting to conceal by reassuring reports fed to public opinion!

As materialists, we are going to expose some elements of the social and economic context in which Science and Medicine were struggling, in order to understand that the HIV retrovirus had every "reason" (commercial and/or "accidental") to appear... at a time when conditions were ripe to create it. This is not a question of sensationalism, but of breaking away from the predominating scientific and democratic folklore.

It is no more possible to envisage the mysterious apparition of AIDS, than it is to appreciate the reasons for the scientists' desperate efforts to obscure its origin, without a grasp of the way in which value intimately determines knowledge, the strict dictatorship of Money over Science, the total collusion between Science and Money (2), the profound unity between pharmaceutical research and commercial need, the inextricable link uniting the military domain, the politicians and the economic world.

We have set out to clarify our fundamental starting points for this text by way of the following comments:

We do not intend to contrast "good" science with "decadent, bad or corrupt" science. Science, as knowledge subsumed by capitalist valorisation, is rotten to the core. Like all of Capital's productive forces, Science is fundamentally inhuman: not only in its applications, but in its foundations.

It is impossible to put Science to good use, just as it is impossible to do so with the Police, for example. We have no more to reproach the Police than we do Science. Our critique is neither a response to "cock-ups" (be they scientific or police) nor a criticism of, for example, the scientific development and police usage of truncheons capable of firing electric shocks. Our practical and theoretical critique relates to the very existence of a force organized and armed in the defence of bourgeois Property. It relates to the essence of a consciousness whose narrow horizons consist of the need to accumulate capital. Science, like the Police, must not be reformed, but destroyed (3).

We apologize for repeating ourselves in this introduction on the subject of how, from a communist point of view, from the point of view of truly human needs, Science is beyond rehabilitation. We reiterate - to ensure that we are really well understood - that in handling this critique of the crap put forward concerning the origin of AIDS, we wish to dissociate ourselves completely from a critique limiting itself to a denunciation of the "excesses" of Science (like the bourgeois left denounce the "excesses" of the Police). The historical dictatorship of Value over Humanity has been enforced on human beings as they strive to develop knowledge, so that even Science's paradigms are rotten to the core. Such fundamental and sacred (so called neutral) concepts such as "matter", "atom"... are strictly determined by money, the narrow minded horizons of the Scientist, that slave to research (money!) and development (capitalist!), who is himself affected in every way by the dictatorship of the rate of profit.

We are not intending to write a scientific anti-thesis. We have taken up specific scientific arguments from time to time, because from our point of view - intent on the destruction of the science of capitalist death - they can sometimes reveal the reality off the commercial and warmongering iceberg hidden beneath the "tip", made up of tons of papers justifying scientific activity (4). Our analysis is therefore neither "scientific" nor "objective" in the bourgeois sense, stemming rather from the reality of existing social relationships. It is on this basis that we state that AIDS is objectively an invaluable commodity for Capital. We want to fight against being used as "medicine fodder", as salaried guinea-pigs.

Let's dive into scientific hell! The old mole is digging underground... let's follow!

Science, Capital's barbarism!

The priests of Science have got several methods of avoiding ridicule and hiding their delirium. One of these is the artificial barrier of abstruse terminology which they call "specialist" and surround themselves with when it comes to their diagnoses, "discoveries", medicines and other witchcraft.

By using another language they are aiming to discourage any attempts to question their power. They wear long white coats (5) for the same reasons. Armed with their jargon and impressive accessories the Scientist is above all a witch, a master!

Medical stupidity is still incapable of pointing out the true origins of the illnesses we suffer (for example, the junk food our wages permit us, the torture known as Work!) and these learned assassins continue to surround themselves with prestigious diplomas and other props, to convince the idiot citizens to let themselves be prodded by them.

But along with the "passive" lies of their vocabulary and ceremonies go the active lies - to protect Science you have to lie, to impose the lie as a truth, dogma and repress those who will not accept it.

Science is a power: that of the State! It is knowledge put to the service of Value. Science is under the orders of the bourgeoisie, serving its Knowledge helping the dominant class in its attempts to impose trade order. The applications of Science are above all commercial and military. Science is a monstrous trade and to impose it, one has to lie!

Galileo was considered to be an heretic by the majority of his colleagues because, by making a mockery of Copernicus's explanation that the earth revolves around the sun, he was exposing, even at that time, the institutionalized ignorance and stupidity that Science represents, thus invalidating years of University and Academic research (6). The lie was imposed on him by making him recant in front of the Inquisition in 1633. But he suffered less than millions of proletarian heretics, who for centuries have tried to flee work, denouncing it as torture but being forced to sing "Work is health", "Hey ho, hey ho! It's off to work we go!" by idiotic popular tradition and Science... or even "Arbeit macht frei".

Nothing has change since the time when those charlatans imposed their lies. Nothing has changed since official medicine advocated blood letting to cure fevers (7).

Today the picture is no brighter.

We are offered "anti-life" atomic bombs (antibiotics) in order to enable us to return to work quickly.

The author of this article, too naive at the time, suffered daily injections of the horrendous poison steroid... to treat a minor depression. To "cure" children's coughs they advocate tranquillizers in the form of syrup (good night and have a good day at work tomorrow, parents!)

The contraceptive pill, that booming commercial enterprise, is a real concentration of poisons leading to a risk of not only breast and uterine cancers, but also malformations of the genital tract in their female descendants... etc... etc.

Here we are not talking about medical "mistakes", such as surgical instruments left inside a stomach, confusion over the amputation of a limb or a mix-up of case-notes, but rather the official version of medicine, what every apprentice-torturer receives as orders by his superiors to calm down - sorry, treat- his patients (8) (they hypocritically call their victims "patients").

No, nothing has changed in the world of lies and Science. The most famous doctors who bled their patients to treat them, were protected and paid by the highest State institutions. No one was allowed to question their knowledge and power. Today, the democratic State finances the ideologies and lies of these thousands of scientific assassins in their redeeming white plumage, who bombard us, year after year, with hypnotics to numb the time we spend recuperating for work, stimulants to keep us awake at work, hormones to fatten up the low cost junk which sustains us and anabolic steroids to beat our "competitors",... Science is the Barbarism of Capital... in all its splendour!

Did HIV come from monkeys ?

It is hardly surprising that, in common with their ancestors, today's representatives of Science attempt to impose their dogmas and lies upon us. Anything goes when protecting commerce and the State. Hence AIDS! To hide the fact that it is yet another monstrosity directly emanating from their laboratories, the State has not skimped on theories to cloud the issue of the laboratory origin of the virus.

A few examples.

In 1981, when a strange and hitherto unknown epidemic came to light, it was attributed to those who appeared to be particularly vulnerable to it: homosexuals. From this stemmed a surge of delirium masked by new diagnoses, emanating from the same idiots who are "reassuring" us today. One of the hypotheses argued that "sperm administered rectally had an immunosuppressant effect". More clearly put, these scientists attributed the loss of man's natural defence to the sweet pleasure of buggery! Thanks, Morality!

In 1985, scientocops fabricated an impressive web of events, beginning with a virus attributed to the African Green monkey. This was supposed to have mysteriously (?!) contaminated West Africans, thus causing a slight mutation of the virus which, after two further steps, brought about the HIV virus, responsible for the epidemic. We are not going to recount the idiotic logic of the laboratory experiments leading them to this conclusion, because in 1988, exposed, they were forced to admit that there had been some contamination in the lab and that the initial virus that they had taken as their starting point... was in fact a product of their own criminal manipulations. Hooray for biology (9)!

Again in 1985, in an attempt to distance the birth date of HIV from the years when material conditions made laboratory fabrication of the virus possible (since 1971!), American scientists "proved" that there were HIV antibodies in more than 50% of blood samples taken and deep frozen in Kenya and Uganda between 1959 and 1970. Loudly proclaimed in all world newspapers, these advances in research were refuted without publicity a few months later: the tests were found to be unreliable and new tests had proved the total absence of HIV antibodies in the same samples! Long live Science!

To distance still further the spectre of the scientific origin of AIDS, it was necessary not only to disconnect the dates at which the illness appeared from the time at which it became possible to engineer the virus, but also to conceal its geographical origin (10).

It is reasonable to think that such a scientific monstrosity originated from the historical world centres of accumulation of scientific knowledge (USA, Europe, Latin America...) and that therefore these same centres are attempting (as if by chance!) to distance the origin from themselves : "the sin must have stemmed from Africa or Haiti!"

Thus, in 1982, the Atlanta Centre for Disease control, an organization collecting medical epidemiological information for the US and influencing doctors throughout the world with its reports and recommendations, defined Haitians as a high risk group. In order to strengthen their case, the CDC argued that Haitians with AIDS do not present any of the "classical" identifying risk factors (IV drug abuse, homosexuality, haemophilia). How did they come to such a conclusion? Simply because the Haitian patients questioned in the US "declared" to the doctors that they were neither homosexuals nor IV drug abusers. One only has to appreciate the taboo of homosexual prostitution in the US as well as in Haiti, the severity of repression by the US Immigration Office, what it is actually like to reply to medical questionnaires (real state interrogation), the widespread condemnation of those admitting to drug addiction... in short, if one can grasp the precariousness of a life clinging to a string pulled by Medicine, Justice and the Immigration Office, one can understand why, out of 34 proletarian immigrants from Haiti who were HIV positive, only 4 would admit the origin of their "crime"!

On this basis, the CDC denounced Haitians and left them to the malice of public opinion. It then took 3 years for the CDC to retract and remove Haitians from the category of a high risk population, although to this day they are banned from giving blood!

This last example is interesting as it illustrates how the cover-ups that the bourgeoisie resort to are never the simple and machiavellian result of a few evil manipulators. All these lies start from a network of half-truths, which meet the needs of the dominant class and obscure the full story (the tree that hides the wood!), distortions of the truth, imposing themselves as ideology.

In defining the Haitians as a high risk group, the scientists started from a material basis (the fear of these immigrant proletarians, a fear consolidated by their refusal to admit to their homosexuality or drug addiction) and conclude statistically ("it's Scientific," they shout as soon as they have collected some numbers) that there are proportionally more Haitians than Americans with HIV!

The condemnation of Haitians has a function - exorcising the fear of millions of Americans - and responds to a need: allowing the continuity of the development of Science (and hence value!) without hindrance. Thus, to protect Medicine and Progress (indispensable to the disorganized movement of Capital), the State has to impose "truths" (ideologies), screening human worries from the horrors of reality.

But these "screens", ideologies, constitute a material force permitting Capital to prolong its inevitable agony: this crap is put forward in scientific terms, littered with absolute declarations, slowly uttered by those responsible for the medical "world", which imposes itself in the face of profanity and makes the idiot people hold Science in awe, in the same way that they kneel in front of the Pope or Yeltsin!

Paradise - be it Christian or "socialist"- uses the Pope's holy water or Castro's cigars as its props and as soon as it is faced with millions of homeless, unemployed, the 40,000 children dying of hunger daily, in short, when its absurd logic is opposed by prosaic reality, there is nothing left!

Nevertheless, it is all these lies that cement public opinion and turns every human being into a schizophrenic, someone separate from himself, sublimating his suffering to the point of defending it as his own happiness (11).

To return to the subject, when one sees the weakness of arguments concerning the origin of AIDS, one would think that this time there is little chance that anyone would fall for them! Wrong! The stupidity of these explanations does not prevent the media from expounding them!

Thus, to distance the date of the appearance of HIV from the period in which material conditions meant that it could be produced in laboratories, the researchers (of lies!) simply "discovered" a few cases of AIDS plump in the middle of the 50's and 60's in Africa. Rapidly it became apparent that tests supposedly demonstrating antibodies to the deadly virus in those old test tubes were invalid (see above). In the end it was decided to diagnose it retrospectively on the basis of vague resemblance to symptoms described in the files of the patients whose blood had been taken!!! To prove the truth of a premise, what better way than to invent it?

In the same way, in the mid 80's, justifications made to lead research of cases of AIDS dating back to the early 70's towards Africa rather than the U.S. (12) were based purely on the fact that it was unthinkable that such a disease could have passed unnoticed in that centre of Progress and Science that is the USA!

Whatever part stupidity, ignorance, lies, machiavellism, defense of interest, competition.... have to play, what drives doctors and other scientists to prolong their monstrous laboratory creation by equally monstrous lies regarding the origin of the virus, what they have in common is the twisted class point of view that makes them submit to the laws of the State, to the dictatorship of commercial expansion and capitalist progress!

The racism underlying ideologies which place the original appearance of AIDS in Africa or Haiti is merely an extension of the dominant power of this giant of Economy (and thus Science and Progress) that is the US.

But racism is not the prerogative of bourgeois Americans: all nations are racist and participate in one way or another in campaigns which denounce a "neighbour" by using AIDS to reinforce National Union. This is not a new concept: throughout history the bourgeoisie has used illness to feed the racist character of the state.

Around 1550, as an epidemic of syphilis spread throughout Europe, every nation tried to pass the buck to "foreigners". The Russians accused the Poles, the English and the Turks called it "the French disease", the French knew it as the Italian illness and the Italians blamed the Spanish...

oOo

Amongst the confusion of these demented "truths", counter-truths imposed upon us, a dominant idea aims to place the origin of the HIV virus well away from scientific labs, far away from the most well-known centres. In fact, everything points to the fact that AIDS appeared at a time when it had become technically possible to create such a virus, but public opinion, vessel for dominant ideology, vulgarizes the scientists' stories and turns itself into a shield against dissenters, making them look like paranoid enemies of Science. It all works out well for them! The world keeps on turning and goods keep on circulating! "The origin of AIDS ", the village gossip explains to me, "can be traced to a mysterious virus found in Green monkeys in Africa and which, because a negro doubtless buggered a monkey, has been transformed into a deadly epidemic. Debauchery (prostitution, homosexuality and drug addiction) then completed the work of these savages by spreading the virus throughout the planet"!

Science's horrific stroll in the garden of retroviruses

We are not going to take our turn at throwing our own pebble in the garden of scientific, journalistic or political hypotheses regarding the precise origin of the AIDS virus. As materialists, we have started by explaining the function of the crap spouted on the subject: to protect Science, defend Medicine, justify the astronomical sums spent in laboratories from which this genetic monster doubtless originates. We now want to give certain examples which show that since the early seventies, it has been technically, scientifically, biologically and materially possible to produce laboratory hybrids (13), clones, of which HIV is only a variant. There is no sensationalism in these proposals: it is a recognised fact, practised and commercially developed by an important section of medical research.

"The technology required to make new retroviruses capable of infecting man out of those already known to be carcinogenic or liable to cause immunodeficiencies or brain diseases in other mammals was already well developed and widely published by the beginning of the 70's. Many of the scientists now researching into AIDS previously worked in the oncology laboratories where the techniques were first developed : Gallo, Essex, Heseltine (U.S); Weiss, Jarret (U.K); Montagnier (France); Zhdanov, Lapin (USSR); Ddinhardt (Germany); etc."

The point of this quotation is not only to give the names of some of the assassins who doubtless managed to produce the monstrosities that we are talking about here. This statement by John Seale, member of the British Royal College of Physicians, published in the "New Scientist" of January 1987, illustrates, along with thousands of other examples, the fact that by the early 70's molecular biology had the means to invent and produce retroviruses capable of attacking the human immune system.

In 1969, in parallel with the resurgence of research into oncology, American scientists identified "reverse transcriptase". Don't panic! This Latin word is no more than the mysterious name given by modern wizards to describe an enzyme (enzyme = a protein involved in controlling the initiation, inhibition and rate of many different chemical reactions in the body; it's a biological catalyst) particular to retroviruses, allowing them to translate their RNA into DNA. Up until this time, Science had claimed with rigid conviction that only the converse was possible, ie the translation of DNA into RNA. The identification of reverse transcriptase has permitted the development of techniques for molecular cloning, ie the production of genetic monsters. This is what we are going to try and explain.

The principal dogma of molecular biology up until then was that it was impossible (and thus heresy!) to think of translating RNA genes into DNA (14). With this "discovery" (15) a whole new revolutionary method was opened up for medicine and "humanity" to, for example, adapt retroviruses specific to animal tumours to the human cell.

Retroviruses are RNA viruses whose specificity lies in their capacity to transcribe their RNA into DNA and then to transmit the DNA into a host cell. The identification of the retroviral enzyme, reverse transcriptase, made it technically possible to insert the virus at the heart of the genetic material of the cell (human or animal), permitting incredible new methods for genetic manipulation and cloning in molecular biology, as well as lucrative commercial enterprise.

Making no apology for repeating ourselves, we want to make sure that the full scale and horror of these weapons that have thus been put in the hands of licensed madmen is understood. We must emphasise that research into retroviruses is not the result of a "brainwave" by a particular scientist, but that the widespread fascination with the "reverse transcriptase" technique is directly linked to the fact that it has made it so easy to create all sorts of hybrids, retroviruses among them, something that was impossible a few years earlier. When it was realised that retroviruses could translate their RNA into DNA a whole new world of possibilities for cloning was opened up.

"In 1971, an amazing confirmation of the unique role of reverse transcriptase came with the demonstration of "infective DNA" (ie capable of infecting) within cells infected by retroviruses. When inserted into uninfected cells this DNA reproduces the virus, ie it carries the virus's genetic code."

Since then it has been possible, however clumsily, to produce genetic monsters by way of retroviruses. A few years later, between 1979 and 1981 (the incubation period of HIV!), the first cases of a rare type of pneumonia began to appear in California: it didn't take long for the white coated terrorists to announce that it was related to a new and original retrovirus. AIDS had started to grow in the horrendous garden of Science...and its emergence coincided exactly (we can never repeat this enough!) with the discovery of the existence of retroviruses and the possibility of cloning them. In order to clarify things a bit further, to make sure that the full extent of the catastrophe brought about by hideous experiments in molecular biology is understood, we want to try and explain how commercial stakes in laboratory research changed when reverse transcriptase came on the scene. Commercial interests were without doubt the driving force behind research into retroviruses and this provided a favourable climate for the "hatching" of HIV (whether accidental or deliberate is of little interest to us).

The pharmaceutical industry - real dictators, commanders and suppliers of capital for everything related to scientific research - has been actively researching ways to produce low-cost (to the manufacturer, of course!) human and animal substances. Like all capitalists, the management of a pharmaceutical company produces "medicines" (16), not to "treat", but to increase capital.

For a drug to be profitable, as with all commodities, a certain degree of human labour must be inherent in its production: the pharmaceutical industry would hardly be interested in egg white alone, presented as medicine (17)! On the other hand, production costs cannot be allowed to reach a level that would make the drug prohibitively expensive. Capitalists are not interested in products that cannot be commercialised.

Another determining factor in the race for profit between capitalists is the unbridled research into ways of producing the same commodity at a lower cost. To this end, industrialists are permanently researching different technology (a new machine, a new technique,...) which will permit them to turn the foundations of productive forces in the production of a particular commodity upside down. In effect, if a capitalist possesses a machine that allows him to produce a given article with a smaller amount of human labour than his competitors, he will not only be able to "corner the market" by selling it at a slightly reduced rate, but he will also - and above all - realise an extraordinnary surplus value, because the world market will continue to estimate the social labour time required for production of the commodity from a worldwide point of view. This means that his particular laboratory will produce, during each hour of labour, commodities which are equivalent to much more than one hour of labour elsewhere on the world market. In other words, an hour of labour in this laboratory will produce far more value (and thus a far greater appropriation of surplus-value) than other labs...for as long as it takes their competitors to get hold of the same technological advances!

There is a product (sorry, a poison!), interferon, whose present production costs are at least as high as its toxicity, which is marketed as a treatment for cancer. The purchaser pays $150 per day and only stops the treatment when the side effects become worse than the cancer! The whole business is extremely profitable for the pharmaceutical industry (18).

As long as capitalists producing this commodity have recourse to the same science and are faced with the same production problems, the situation remains static. In certain periods, it is not in their interest for things to develop, because it would be too blatant a contradiction within the global development of whichever branch of the economy (19). However now, doubtless because it is no longer possible to silence the multiple contradictions arising out of the DNA dogma and also because competition demands it, capitalists producing interferon are seeing their productive forces turned completely upside down by the discovery of reverse transcriptase and its ability to translate RNA into DNA. It is now possible to produce interferon in large quantities and the pharmaceutical capitalists are jostling one another to put the multiple applications of this "discovery" into practice (interferon is not the only one, of course!) and to put themselves in a position to benefit from this extraordinary, though short-lived surplus value!

We are briefly and as simply as possible, going to describe the difficulties that the pharmaceutical capitalists previously came up against in synthesising biological molecules.

In order to make bacteria (unicellular organisms) produce substances (proteins, that will become the active substance in a medicine) it is necessary to graft onto the bacteria a part of the genome (genetic material) of a cell normally producing the protein, although in small quantities.

The researcher is confronted with many sizeable problems, the biggest of which is the difficulty in isolating the DNA sequence enabling production of the protein. DNA is translated into messenger RNA and this mRNA is then read to produce the protein. However here, the researcher is faced with an astronomical number of different sequences (each one coding for a specific protein) amongst which ONLY ONE sequence will give the finished product, the desired protein. The mind boggles when contemplating the search for a few dozen sequences amongst millions.

It is in this field that reverse transcriptase brought to the pharmaceutical capitalist what the steam engine brought to the industrialist. In effect, reverse transcriptase is an enzyme of viral origin (coming from a retrovirus) permitting the synthesis of DNA from RNA. mRNA can be isolated much more easily than the DNA sequence in the genome first, because it is produced in far greater quantities than the DNA which only carries the desired sequence once and second, because, in the majority of cases, a single protein corresponds to one mRNA.

Therefore, our pharmaceutical capitalist who had to find the DNA sequence corresponding to the protein, with all the difficulties that that entailed, now only needs to isolate mRNA, let reverse transcriptase act on it to translate it into DNA which can then be used directly to graft onto bacteria.

It can thus be seen that reverse transcriptase, in addition to permitting the manipulations that we have mentioned above, is an enormous financial, commercial and economic (euphemistically known as "scientific" in specialist journals) asset to capitalism, permitting the emergence of innumerable poisons that will soon be sold to us as medicines.

We will now go on to demonstrate the fervour with which scientists worked to master this enzyme, the source of such profit.

From 1971 onwards, when reverse transcriptase's specific activity was identified, American oncologists threw themselves into fevered research and hunted down the famous enzyme in patients that they had under their thumbs. In 1970, Robert Gallo, of the National Cancer Institute in Bethseda, USA, identified and isolated reverse transcriptase in the white blood cells of leukaemia sufferers. In 1971, Stuart Aronson modified a specific mouse tumour retrovirus, extended its infective gene sequence and adapted it to human cells.

The same year, scientists managed to cleave a macaque virus, aiming to stick half of it onto a cleaved "bacteria digester" known as Lambda. This molecule was to be inserted into E.Coli, one of the bacteria present in normal human intestines. Imagine the damage if this genetically engineered molecule were, "by accident", to escape from the lab and find its way back to man! The official version of history is that certain scientists, enemies of Progress, prevented the project from reaching completion. In fact, they just wanted to move on! Other projects came to light and, what is certain is that, by 1971 it was possible to produce genetic jigsaws. A new kind of craftsman, armed with his scalpel (restriction enzymes), his transfer enzymes ("transcriptase" to translate DNA into RNA and reverse transcriptase to do the opposite) and his electron microscope, the molecular biologist is able to launch his attack on viruses, retroviruses and bacteria, cleaving them, assembling and reassembling them and testing them on human embryos (the most expensive) or on monkeys.

In 1972, the World Health Organisation (an agency directly dependent on the UN, and hence mainly on the USA) published an issue of their journal demanding that work be started to study the effects of certain viruses on the immune system, in particular the effects of infection on T lymphocytes (20). This is a further example to illustrate that the manipulations of viruses and retroviruses, whether hybrid or not, have not been carried out by alchemists who have strayed from the common path, but are the direct result of work by the most highly trained (to poison us better!) scientists under the leadership of the world's most prestigious medical men and women.

Does this give us a good enough idea as to the origins of this biological Chernobyl that scientists have subjected us to? No!

In the same year, experimentation upon human beings was announced at the 7th conference of the National Cancer Institute:

"The biology of cancer makes it necessary to study human beings using observational methods of the same degree of sophistication characterising animal experiments", explained Dr John Higginson, director of the National Agency for Cancer Research in Lyon. "Let it be clear that these techniques "characterising animal experiments" included the inoculation of the disease!" (21)

That year, 1972, in the "Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital" in Brooklyn, cancerous tissues were transplanted into men without their knowledge (22).

In 1974, they "successfully" grafted a gene onto a recently fertilized mouse egg: the foreign gene was transmitted hereditarily. They also managed to "successfully" grow sheep visna virus and bovine leukaemia virus in a human cell.

Our description of the infinite horrors of recombinant genetics, gene grafting, monstrous couplings of animal viruses with human cells and criminal and hazardous tests... stops here. To avoid getting indigestion we are now going to consider how ethical problems, moral anxieties and debates between the 'hawks' and 'doves' of Science and Progress raised by these experiments only represent a further step towards unrestrained experimentation. In the same way that the establishment of peace is necessary for the outbreak of war, conferences organised by scientists to decide whether all of this carries a danger of introducing genetic crap into the human system of heredity actually constitute the most efficient trampoline from which to launch research, unleashed!

It was along these lines that a conference was held in Asilomar and these hypocrites questioned the risks posed by genetic recombinations. A year long moratorium was imposed, but during a second Asilomar conference they made a ruling: it was necessary to protect the learned, the technicians as well as the human race! What a joke! Boots, gloves and helmets became regulation and varying levels of security were defined according to the degree of danger of the experiments...and everybody threw themselves back into fevered molecular biology research. Morality and ethics were redefined to serve better serve commercial and military. The learned fools of the human race, are financially dependent upon laboratories and the main laboratories are all placing their bets upon molecular biology. So, here we go!

The demand for human cells has become enormous. "Flow", "Microbiological of Walkerville" and "C of Maryland" are the three giant companies supplying labs, fighting tooth and nail to corner the market. In 7 years, "Flow" alone imported 12,000 pairs of kidneys from South Korea, vivisected from children removed prematurely by caesarian section in the third trimester of pregnancy. "Flow" is a subsidiary of the "General Research Corp.", which is involved in strategic research for the Pentagon and whose president admits that "organs have been bought to carry out organic cultures for medical research". "In Singapore and Switzerland", explains George Wald, Nobel prize winner in Medicine, hardly likely to be suspected of sympathizing with us anti-progressivists, "we have estimated the number of 'products of abortion' imported by the US between 1969 and 1978 at around 80,000" (23).

Commercially, with this 'boom' in molecular biology, the human cell has become an excellent commodity. Companies are being set up, competition is going all out, stimulating Science. Firms are springing up (Cetus, Genentech, Biogene...) and are centring their activities around products of recombinant genetics.

They are always lead by those who are known as the brains of the world, the most famous geneticists, the popes of molecular biology, the avant-garde of cancer research.

The market for molecular biology is ripe. Ever since the synthesis of the first gene in 1972, the molecular electronics sector has attracted computer firms and constitutes a major industrial and strategic stake. To mention only one of these giants, IBM is interested in attempts to replace silicon, an essential substance for information storage, with organic materials such as protein chains or enzymes, manipulated bacteria or viruses, etc,...

War and Commerce, the driving forces of Science !

Without going into all the new commercial demands of molecular biology since the blossoming of the genetic jigsaw, it is necessary to mention the jewel in the crown of research, one of the most important sources of finance for all these experiments, the real and historical motor of science: the Army.

The arms market has been interested in molecular electronics right from the beginning. The research is financed by enormous amounts of capital and projects are approved one after the other. They obviously remain secret, but all sorts of applications are tried and tested. The applications that are most dangerous to us clearly remain the property of the Army and a law was passed in 1969 to ensure that this monopoly is maintained without exception.

As with all laws, amendments are presented as a defence of the common good, although they actually sanction assassins draped in patriotic colours to produce and test the effectiveness of the genetic monsters they have created:

"... none of the funding granted should be used for open air trials of deadly chemical agents, neither of microorganisms causing disease, nor biological toxins (...), unless the Ministry of Defence, authorized by the US President, confirms that the test is necessary for national security."

The retrovirus tops the bill in all this research because, as we have seen earlier, it is - by way of reverse transcriptase - the essential and ideal vector for incorporation into other genomes.

Delegates from the Pentagon were already announcing the future direction of their research into viral "collages" by 1969:

"During the coming 5 to 10 years it will probably be possible to produce a new infective organism which may be considerably different from all known pathogenic micro-organisms."

They went on, in front of the Congress's credit commission:

"The importance of these germs is that they may be resistant to the immunological and therapeutic measures upon which we depend to keep ourselves relatively protected from infectious diseases."

Must we look any further to find the origin of the viral bomb-blast of HIV? And let us make it quite clear that it was not the result of a momentary aberration by a more machiavellian tendency (24) at the heart of the US State. Biological weapons had been envisaged for decades and the recruitment of the retrovirus dates back to 1952, when the techniques for its "rearrangement" and reproduction had not yet been developed. At this time, in Ottowa, it was envisaged as an agent for foot-and-mouth disease to destroy enemy herds.

Between 1976 and 1977, parliamentary enquiries took place in the US and revealed that a biological research programme had started in 1963 in the Fort Detrick military laboratory, using deadly infectious agents and neurotoxins. During this period, one molecular biologist, one electrician and an employee in the monkey section of Fort Detrick mysteriously died.

As we can see, the joyful achievements that we are lead to by medical research are the result of lengthy research, directly financed and directed by the State. The example of the USA is particularly telling, when one understands the avant-garde function of the local organisation of the bourgeois state in this part of the world. Progress in molecular biology directly and permanently interests American scientists and militarists.

It should be clear, at this stage of the text, that the separation between scientist, industrialist and militarist is an artificial one; research into molecular biology, more specifically centred on military applications, are inextricably linked with medical research. Fort Detrick, the military laboratory of the US army, near Washington in Maryland, is directly attached to and linked to the National Cancer Institute in Bethseda, a suburb of the American capital. To strengthen our argument we have put a short extract of a list of high-powered American scientists in this text, supported by the positions they occupy on the Administrative Councils of major pharmaceutical trusts and the links uniting them with the military domain.

As for the security standards decreed during the shameful conferences in Asilomar, these were set up by the National Institute for Health itself, defining four different types of laboratory of which the most highly protected, known as "P4", is also the best equipped...and the most "militarized": the first of these labs opened in 1977, in the same building as Fort Detrick, conceived and built by "Vickers" weapons factory.

---------------------------------

Here is a short illustration of the inextricable links between the industrial and military sectors. It is a list of the administrative and academic staff of the M.I.T. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), a North American scientific College:

All of the non-academic staff linked to the Lincoln Laboratory of the M.I.T. come from the military industrial or defence sectors (more often than not, from both at the same time). All the C.V.s look like this one:

In short, it can be seen that Science and War merge into one, the learned and the militarists rowing together on the galley of Progress and Medicine! Cancer research is an essential support for the development of a cover permitting advances in military destructive technology. It is also a source of power, prestige and money for medical careerists (25). In the field of medical research, the scientist is King! War is the historical motor of Science: Progress never advances faster than it does in wartime and in this domain, research has no limits.

Whilst oncologists were studying the immune system, in particular between 1970 and 1975, research was being lead in parallel towards the discovery of a weapon of mass destruction:

"We know that American researchers concentrated on the question of whether or not it is possible to produce a kind of chemical or biological weapon that could kill people of one race and leave others more or less unscathed. These are what are known as "ethnic weapons". Certainly, techniques in genetics and molecular biology permit the development of these type of weapons."

This statement is no more from 'Paris-Match' than it is from the pages of a leftist rag. It is a statement made in 1983 by a renowned biologist, Seven Rose, of the British Open University's department for research into the brain.

It doubtless doesn't take many "brains" to spend one's life torturing monkeys and sheep to extract molecular hybrids. It requires even less "humanity", when crazed (but commercial) research by the pharmaceutical industry and other state agents leads to "ethnic weapons"! Scientific progress can no longer take us by surprise, in the face of the ever deepening chaos of this moribund society, only just able to regenerate itself through war.

Research into methods of destruction, orchestrated by the State, is permanent and goes back to the origins of class societies. However society has never before attained the current degree of barbarity. Where human reasoning remains, they would have us believe that a limit has been reached in the destruction of the human race and the planet that supports it: however Capital's infernal progress always proves them wrong. Just when you think that the maximum of what is organically and materially possible for man to bear has been reached, that Capital can go no further in its savage destruction of human minds and bodies, a new development comes and shatters this illusion.

Value devours everything! The State puts proletarians in the position where the sale of their labour alone is not enough to survive and forces them to sell their own organs.

The requirements of Science and Commerce push human limits ever further, profiting from the proletarians' worsening living conditions. Freedom to buy and sell is the basis of democracy: why not then trade in human organs that others freely choose to sell (26)?

Chemical and biological weapons, ethnic weapons, buying (by Science) and selling human organs (to survive)... We could go on and discuss "Zyklon" pesticides, gases which were used as weapons, the scientists, who created them with such care and attention, always able to claim after the massacre that they never intended them to be used like that. We could talk about all the poisons put in storage for many years, which the laboratories, always on the look-out for new ways of making profit, are bringing back out today, thanks to AIDS (27). We could describe the horror of the scientific executions of those on death row in the USA, etc.,but no further lists of the barbarity created by the insatiable appetite for buying and selling could be enough to open anyone's eyes. What's the point of relating additional horrors, when the very existence of worldwide capitalist Democracy produces the monstrous contradiction of starving more than 120 thousand people to death every day, whilst at the same time, the law of Value forces capitalists to destroy tonnes and tonnes of food?

This fact alone reveals the true horror of the mass-grave on which we live and no amount of "consciousness raising" can change the reality: only worldwide organisation and growing links between revolts springing from the permanent degradation of the proletariat's living conditions can put an end to the capitalist apocalypse.

The AIDS virus is not an accident !

In this short description of the context in which Scientific research has orientated itself in recent years, we have emphasized the simultaneous appearance of AIDS and the technological ability to produce it. There are more specific and very coherent articles which give a fuller account of the actual process leading to the production of HIV (28). We cannot delay ourselves further by attempting to prove what the facts prove alone: it's not a coincidence that such a spectacularly virulent and fatal virus appeared at a time when the technology existed to produce it. At least we will not die stupid as long as we denounce the true criminals at the origin of this epidemic: the scientists!

The State covers it up quite badly, and maximum embarrassment is caused by the "taboo" question of whether it's technically possible to produce HIV. In order to deny its scientific origins, Science's disciples only have one answer: "what possible interest could there be in developing a virus against which we cannot protect ourselves?!" For these medical priests, HIV does not meet the criteria for effectiveness with malicious intent,... and could not, therefore, have been produced by society!

Science continually sings the praises of the ideology of "objectivity" and luckily this has had an effect on some of them. When, in 1987, a journalist bluntly asked whether "if HIV did not exist, would it be possible to create it?", Dr.Brun-Vezinet replied "Yes, we can!". Professor Montagnier answered "Yes, we could". Dr.Chermann sat on the fence and Dr.Alizon denied the possibility... although in explaining why not, actually admitted that, if one thought hard about it, "it would be possible to produce an even more infectious agent, by preserving the viral envelope capable of recognising lymphocytes and using it to produce a much more pathogenic virus such as the 'flu virus; this could cause epidemics spreading like wildfire" (29).

It is thus impossible to deny that Science is capable of producing similar viruses, but even those who admit this to us put their white coats back on and ask us solemnly to disregard the poisons they create, to forget their commercial and military function, to ignore the innumerable cock-ups made in their labs, to clear our minds of the collusion between Cancer Research and National Defence Institutes, to stop thinking about the microbiological demons they continue to conceive...and to believe in the Holy Crusade of Science!

It's like listening to the worshippers of whichever god explaining that if you don't believe, it's because you have no faith, and if you want the faith...you have to believe. Religion promises us Paradise if we keep our mouths shut on earth; and Science assures us of a cure if we submit ourselves and close our eyes to it! Science and Religion are part of the same family: Value. The State. They have both always played a part in maintaining the status quo, either by way of preservation or adjustment of the worldwide system. One of the ways in which they try to do this is by lying outright, concealing reality because it is too powerful in decredibilising the State.

In February 1991 it was revealed that children between 6 and 15 years old were regularly raped by about 20 priests at a Catholic Convent near Montreal between 1950 and 1970. The police had known about it from the beginning, but the State had denied and covered up the facts in order to impose christian order, necessary for the coherence of the local State at the time. The same thing is happening as regards AIDS today, but the consequences of "confessing" are far heavier as there is much more at stake. Science is already accused of impotence, faced with the impossibility of curing; where would it be if the connection between society's military projects and the appearance of this worldwide epidemic were made public? The hideous Health representatives prefer to recite their moral litany, encouraging "prevention" as regards sexual excesses "which, for the most part, do not increase satisfaction, but on the contrary, lead to serious risks such as AIDS," as put by Professor Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris (30).

Today, discussions concerning the origin of AIDS have been more or less stifled by medical ideological enterprise. The most recent argument used to stave off any attempts to revive this issue consists of giving prime importance to finding practical solutions to AIDS: "Discussing the origin of AIDS is philosophizing, what we need are concrete solutions". Thus the race for research and profit is justified. The medical stampede can continue, determined more than ever by commercial competition, exacerbated as the capitalist crisis deepens day by day.

In the face of this, we had to break down the wall of silence built by the scientific State and resite the AIDS epidemic in the real context in which it appeared: the worldwide capitalist race for ever increasingly concentrated accumulation of Value.
The AIDS virus is not an accident!
Whether it is the result of an error during laboratory manipulations, a hybrid produced by a brain driven mad by Science or the direct result of crazed search for yet another weapon to add to the teeming armamentarium of those paranoid in the Defence of the Nation, matters little. Whatever the case, the AIDS retrovirus is the product of a society made ill by money, competition and commerce! AIDS is not a God-sent plague to remind us of morality. AIDS is the result of the infernal logic that human beings have suffered since Value became autonomous by way of a law submitting every human relationship, all new knowledge, all creative activity...to the strict dictatorship of the world market.

The laws of the market impose a permanent war between us all. Capitalists tear each other apart to corner the market and they mercilessly submit the very people they exploit -the proletarians- to the same war: "If you want a wage you must fight your competitors on the Labour Market!" In this war of all against all, Capital's self-limiting mechanism (the production of more surplus value than it is capable of realising) tends to be overruled by the infernal competition between market competitors; this race for profit leads them to conceive and develop "revolutionary" productive forces in all fields, permitting them to dominate one or other sector of the market by selling at lower cost.

Progress and Science thus rub shoulders with Commerce by submitting human consciousness to the same market dictatorship. Science only functions and develops thanks to massive funding of research along the lines intended by capitalists - research into developing the most effective weapon, to satisfy the cravings of whichever capitalist association, baptized "Nation". Research into machines, knowledge or techniques to yield the best production. Research to be the first to launch a drug able to relieve headaches completely or to bring about hair regrowth onto the market!

The AIDS virus is not an accident!

It is the result of unbridled research by Science, under the orders of Commerce, responding to the market needs of the pharmaceutical industry, bionics, molecular electronics, computing, etc,...

Science is not an accident either. Science is the product, and agent, of Capital. Science is the negation of human knowledge, in that its development is based on the need for capitalist development. It exists as the negation of Humankind, seeking to submit every discovery, every experience, all knowledge to the democratic dictatorship of Commodity and the State defending it.

It doesn't matter to them that the medicines they create are tested with fatal consequences on human beings who accept the tests because they have no other means to live or because they no longer have the strength to protest: the aim of Science is Commerce! The function of Science... is Ignorance: by elevating itself to the level of a divine sect next to the State that finances it, Science takes on, maintains and directs the separation between human beings and the knowledge that is vital to them. In this way the proletariat remains ignorant of the enemy, the total antagonism: Capital. It is impossible to describe the inhumanity to which the proletariat is subjected: if we have a headache, it is not because we have worked eight hours a day,... but because we need aspirin!

oOo

"... With you, comrade, we will continue to fight! Every moment and everywhere. We saw your burial as a fight, because every moment in this world of silence is a fight. Yes! Even to bury a comrade! Can you believe it? The balance of forces between our class and the hated class is even expressed in a funeral. At a different time, at a time when one of our deaths is paid for by hundreds of theirs, we could have unfurled our flags, black with anger, and celebrated your memory in a life of revolution.

However, this time, we had to fight to prevent one of those dark hyenas known as "priests" from leaning over you; we had to fight to impose your "real family" - those of us who had forged bonds of struggle together - as your funeral procession; we had to fight because, even at the time of the cremation, some 'bigwig' wanted to take up more time and place to send-off his trussed-up dead; we had to struggle against the farce of those poor idiots, dressed in grey and paid to cry, all the while hurrying the ceremonies along; we had to struggle against the ridicule of the morbid spectacle that surrounds such circumstances, where, in this anti-pleasure society, the done thing is to make the widow cry and to screw-up the living! Don't worry, comrade, your death has not frightened us. It has given us a lot more determination in our struggle to get rid of the monstrous inhumanity of Capital once and for all!

Science will not have the last word. Already some of the proletarians affected by the same poison that condemned you, have started to avenge their future deaths - by biting police and other agents of the State who have sought to control them, until they have drawn blood. Proletarian resistance will always find a suitable response to the most twisted forms of capitalist aggression!

"Is there life after death?"

With you, comrade, we answer yes. We continue to maintain that "true life" resides within the continuity of our relentless struggle to organise ourselves as a force, determined to bring down, once and for all, the pathetic leeches who exploit us, to impose a society without classes and without money."

Notes

1. At the time of going to press, the world media announced, on the basis of a 3 year study on 1749 patients: "There is no difference in the rate of progression to a more serious or final stage of the disease between those taking AZT and those not." (Libération, Le Monde,... 2.4.93)

Since the mid 80's, nearly 10 years now, the same media broadcast reassuring "medical" information that AZT was the only way to combat the fatal progression of AIDS. In retrospect, it may be easier to imagine how the "pressures" we talk about in the introduction materialized. The doctors absolved themselves of responsibility as soon as they heard that our comrade refused, against their advice, to take AZT. Those close to him were practically treated like assassins because of their refusal to support "specialist medical advice", the doctors continuing to terrorize them to the point of specifying the time scale by which his death would be brought forward if their advice was not taken... This constitutes the dictatorship of Value for the imposition of its commodities on human beings.

2. If a further example is needed to illustrate this collusion, it is enough to recall the recent publicity surrounding the contaminated batches of blood which the French Blood Transfusion Centre continued to distribute to haemophiliacs, because it was in their financial interest to do so. But let's not be fooled: the media latches onto a particular story in order to increase the credibility of the whole of Science and the State. When the press reveals cock-ups made by the Police or Scientists, denouncing one or the other as being "irresponsible", it does so with the aim of justifying the very existence of the Police and murderous Medicine.

3. It is clear that future society, communist society, will require knowledge, as a structured explanation of phenomena and will find it necessary to transmit this knowledge both geographically and down through generations... But we very much doubt that the term "Science" will be retained. It is so loaded with historical bourgeois significance that even if it is brought down to its neutral etymological origin, "exact knowledge of things", it still could not be used, just as the term "Religion" originally refers to the "natural link of human beings with nature and with each other", but which is far too loaded with bourgeois significance to ever be used otherwise.

4. The same thing goes for Scientific as it does for other information. Generally, when discussing class struggle we only have a few paragraphs at our disposal, robbed of their originality, describing the content of the struggle in terms of numbers of dead. In the same way, to write this text on AIDS we had to read between the lines, absorb opposing points of view in order to destroy them, collect true personal accounts, so much richer than any stories told in the magazines, read pages and pages of disgusting crap, steeped in Knowledge, to reveal contradictions and expose what has been obscured...A task made even more arduous by its being a poorly accessible domain, not only from the point of view of the taboo of scientific Knowledge, but also because of the mindless logic that inevitably clouds the issue around such matters.

5. This scientific disguise is used today to permit any old clown to make propaganda for whichever suncream or toothpaste. There is no doubt that science sells; above all, there is also no doubt that the common man is convinced by this circus to exchange his life for shiny, coloured mirrors.

6. Copernicus and Galileo went much further than this, without realizing it. In making the Earth turn around the Sun, they theoretically prolonged the influence that the nascent bourgeoisie had upon the lords. The Earth ceased to be the centre of the world and God, the centre of creation. The feudal lords thus lost their divine status. They began to favour the emergence of the new god of the new dominant class: Science.

7. The very conservative "Ordre des Médecins" in France, well specialised in all sorts of witch-hunts, can no longer conceal that "there is no doubt that the medicine of the 18th century killed more people than it cured". This statement appeared a few years ago in France in the "Quotidien du Médecin", a French medical journal.

8. As often happens, etymology reveals the deep meaning of a word that modern society has tried to alter. "Patient", from the Latin "patiens", means "he who is made to suffer", a derivation from the Latin "pati" (to suffer). One of the French definitions of "patient" includes the unchanged origin from the Latin: "a person who is subjected to or will be subjected to torture" (Petit Robert 1990).

9. Messing about with cells from monkeys is very common in biology. Green monkeys are used for, amongst other things, the production of vaccines, something which points to the fact that if there ever has been a link between HIV and Green monkeys, it would have stemmed directly from the manipulations of the laboratory technocrats' snowy-white and "clean" hands, rather than from the "perverted lust" of Africans, as implied by judeo-christian racist morality.

10. Some scientists even go so far as claiming that HIV originated in Space! An astrophysicist from the University of Wales, Chandra Wickramasinghe, has been working for years on the cosmic origins of certain illnesses, such as 'flu, and claims that HIV could have come from Space. However spectacular his thesis, it at least shows that he has ruled out the possibility of any other earthly origin apart from laboratory production: "The AIDS virus either escaped form a laboratory or it comes from Space." (El Pais, 24/12/1992)

11. Recently, in a Swiss magazine, we saw a brilliant example of this kind of contradiction within the proletariat. Under the threat of the deportation of all her family, an immigrant mother, terrorised by the Immigration Office, stated: "I know that there is freedom here in Switzerland, but when the doorbell rings, I tremble."

12. Out of 288,377 cases of AIDS recorded by the WHO from the start of the epidemic until the end of 1990, 50% have been in the US and 25% in 45 African countries. Even though statistics often conceal the essential from us, these ones nevertheless go some way to correct the currently accepted viewpoint that Africa is the most infected continent, an opinion which corroborates western racist theories.

13. A hybrid is a genetic monster made up of several cell varieties with different genetic origins.

14. A few months before reverse transcriptase proved its existence in Science's sceptical eyes, Jacques Monod, considered to be one of the great masters of modern science, defended the prevailing dogma of DNA in his book "Coincidence and Necessity", stating that "it has never been observed, nor is it conceivable, that the information could ever be transferred in the opposite direction". The ridicule killed him!

15. We have put "discovery" in brackets because it is necessary to realise that many researchers had been opposed to this scientific dogma for a long time (for example, Beljanski, in France, was banned from the Pasteur Institute), but they were denied research funding because they refused to submit themselves to the medical and scientific Inquisition's dogma! Today, the same people who previously defended the "holy dogma", describe the "discovery" of enzymes capable of using viral DNA, as a mould for synthesising DNA, as revolutionary.

16. The use value of pharmaceutical products is subsumed at this point by exchange value, which could more objectively be referred to as "poison" than "medicine"!

17. The example of egg white is not deliberately provocative! There is an antiviral agent (AL 721) which is very accessible and can be isolated in egg white, but which is not profitable enough for the pharmaceutical industry. They would only show interest if the amount of labour force crystallised within the product allowed its commercialisation as a commodity with a significant enough degree of surplus value!

18. Discovered in 1957 and marketed as an anti-cancer agent, interferon enabled the capitalists who patented it to make intermittent business out of it, each time justified by research. For 15 years, the labs that were experimenting on it received heavy funding. Always tested on cancer sufferers, the economic performance of interferon was inversely proportional to the state of health of the guinea-pigs: in the early 70's it had to be shelved.

But then genetic manipulations came into play and rekindled interest and funding for the product. Speculation began, shares were soaring! A publicity campaign began to establish research into it, but soon interest (financial!) dropped off again because it became public knowledge that when treatment is stopped cancer cells proliferate! Happily for the product's shareholders, HIV came on the scene and gave another justification for bringing the poison out of the cupboard!

19. This is how a good doctor, full of illusions about the purity of the world he thought he was entering into, has ended up living under-cover somewhere in Columbia, with killers hired by pharmaceutical trusts hot on his heels. This doctor developed an effective vaccine against hepatitis B, but refused to give his patent up to one of the powerful multinationals. Naive, he intended to give his vaccine to a non-governmental and third-worldist organisation so that, as he believed, the vaccine could be produced at low cost and therefore be available to the poorest populations of Asia and Africa.

20. T lymphocytes are one of the main types of lymphocytes; these are a category of white cells with a so-called "specific" immune function, because they selectively recognise the substance threatening the organism. They print antigens into their memory and can therefore respond immediately the next time they are exposed to a given antigen. Amongst these T lymphocytes ("T" because they are produced via the thymus gland), "T4" lymphocytes coordinate and direct the overall defence. Their outer membrane carries the OKT4 molecule, upon which the AIDS retrovirus attaches a corresponding part of its envelope, thus entering, as if sucked in from the inside.

21. "Tristes chimÃ¨res", Rolande Girard (1987).

22. Today this practice of ruthless experimentation is under control, subjected to international legislation... and is thus generalised! In order to put someone who is terminally ill into a trial, the laboratory has to obtain permission from an "Ethics Committee" (yes, yes, "ethics"!), which is in fact a committee of the hospital establishment in which the trial will take place. In order to reassure their relatives, the labs extort "consent" in the form of a signature from the patient...unless this unofficial trial is already part of a "protocol" accepted by international legislation.

"In this way all trials will either be massive yet controlled; or ruthless yet legal. The State legislates the tautology between a citizen made ill by one world and a world which sees the illness it produces as a guaranteed endless industrial challenge. The methods used by those who are given the right to carry out research can be seen, in the long term, to be as damaging as the illness itself. Thus, radiation produces tumours, which are destroyed by radiation, which will give rise to other tumours, etc..."

Extract from "N'Dréa", published by "Os Cangaceiros", February '92.

23. A vile trade in human organs is developing throughout the world, kidneys being most in demand: nearly 10,000 people are awaiting kidney transplants. Tradesmen are therefore hunting for kidneys. An Anatolian peasant, living in Istanbul, recently had his kidney removed, having thought he had just signed a contract for a job in London. He received $4000 damages, although the cost of the operation for the recipient came to $100,000, the difference ending up in the pockets of the surgeons and middle-men. The scandal was such that the white butchers were "sentenced"... to working in the National Health Service alone, with a temporary ban on working in the private sector!

The kidney is not the only possible source of profit. In Bogota, Columbia, children have their eyes enucleated in the slums and the hospitals: Porto Rico, Guadeloupe and Miami are subsidiaries in the commercialisation of organs -the worldwide capitalist market sees gold even in the gaze of children!

24. It is wrong to label as "machiavellian" those who are only stating loud and clear what Capital demands of them. Thus, Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank and ex US Secretary of State (he ordered massive bomb attacks on Vietnam) spoke openly about the methods of struggle against what he calls "galloping demography":

"Epidemic illnesses are a natural way of reducing the population (...). We must take draconian measures for demographic reduction against the will of the population. It has proved impossible or insufficient to reduce birth rates. It is therefore necessary to increase death rates. How? By natural methods: Famine and sickness."

25. As the graffiti on the walls of the Villejuifjunior doctors' on-call room goes: "more people live off cancer than die from it!"

26. What could be more normal than the American democratic model being, once again, the sword defending private property, right down to its bodily and organic manifestations? A recent judgment by the Californian Supreme Court recognised that everyone has property rights over their body and thus accepts that parts of it can be freely commercialised. The freedom to have one's body at one's disposal can not be denied by the State. Proletarian in hardship, democracy protects you: you have the right to sell your kidney! Who could still claim that the present day salaried slave is superior to the slave of Antiquity?

27. We want to talk about AZT - zidovudine - which is extremely toxic. Peter Duesberg, a professor of Molecular Biology, not one to criticize science much normally, stated the following:

"I think that AZT is AIDS on prescription. This substance prevents the process of replication of DNA within cells, thus blocking not only the multiplication of the HIV virus, but at the same time destroying all reproducing cells, particularly those of the immune system. AZT is not only useless but fatal."

28. The AIDS virus, according to one of these theories, is a hybrid resulting from assembling the VISNA virus (a "lentivirus" responsible for a brain disease in sheep, largely in Island, and which, like HIV, is characterised by its extremely long incubation period) with part of HTLV-1 attached to it (HTLV-1 is a widespread virus in Northern Japan and causes lymphoproliferative cancers in humans). In order to defend their theory, the scientists (who are now treated as heretics and have been banned) describe a 23 point assembly that occurs when one "couples" the AIDS virus with VISNA. This would appear to confirm the close genetic origins of these two viruses; they conclude their argument by illustrating that the part of the human virus (HTLV-1) grafted onto VISNA (previously non-virulent for humans), is precisely the part of the genetic code (DNA) which programmes the production of a protein permitting the attachment of HTLV-1 onto human T-4 lymphocytes. According to this theory, as soon as the protein was attached, VISNA became virulent to the cells and thus to humans!

This theory has since been denounced as propaganda orchestrated by counter-espionage from what was the USSR. Gorbatchov even made an official apology. Is this a manoeuvre to cloud the issue or are these real capitalist contradictions? Today, Professor Gallo himself, the number 1 of AIDS research, has been denounced by the American police for having concealed details of his discovery of the AIDS virus. Will Clinton also apologize?

29. "Tristes chimÃ¨res", Rolande Girard (1987).

30. In this text we have not attempted to comment on the way in which the State has used AIDS to reinforce its anti-pleasure drive. AIDS is presented as a penitence and Morality has never been so powerful in imposing Family, Tradition, Abstinence, Sacrifice, Marriage and Chastity as guardians of Order in this world.

I feel to preface the piece by describing it as 'hysterical' is not in a spirit of fraternity that is necessary for the progress of our movement. To criticise it on the basis of whether or not aids or HIV is a virus appears to me pedantry and does not get to the heart of the matter.

I look forward to reading your comments but please be concise, time is tight.

to be honest, "hysterical" is being kind to it. I would describe the article is completely insane, but that would be an insult to the insane, who often have a lot to say about the world which is extremely useful, unlike this article.

to be honest, "hysterical" is being kind to it. I would describe the article is completely insane, but that would be an insult to the insane, who often have a lot to say about the world which is extremely useful, unlike this article.

The only thing hysterical about the article above is Steven's reaction to it.

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